18 January 2012

"All the same, Ms. Deen said she would not change her own lifestyle or cooking style drastically, other than to reduce portion sizes of unhealthful foods. 'I’ve always preached moderation,' she said. 'I don’t blame myself.'" nyt

John: also, while i support this, it's sort of upsetting that this is finally facing such major opposition while the defense authorization act which legalized indefinite detention of american citizens without trial just breezed by.me: illegally detained prisoners cant show me unlimited baby sloth videosJohn: that's true
if i had unfettered access to videos of baby sloths while being indefinitely detained in cuba, i wouldn't exactly call that prison.
or torture
i guess you have to pick your battlesme: i just tried to wikipedia something
son of a

i certainly know how he feels. i have a section of my closet that i call the "only under a sweater section." those are the button up shirts that are so tight i can only wear them under a sweater because the buttons pull so much.

newsweek's andrew sullivan makes a balanced and sweeping case for the success of obama's presidency thus far, and not just from a liberal standpoint.

The job collapse bottomed out at the beginning of 2010, as the stimulus took effect. Since then, the U.S. has added 2.4 million jobs. That’s not enough, but it’s far better than what Romney would have you believe, and more than the net jobs created under the entire Bush administration. In 2011 alone, 1.9 million private-sector jobs were created, while a net 280,000 government jobs were lost. Overall government employment has declined 2.6 percent over the past 3 years. (That compares with a drop of 2.2 percent during the early years of the Reagan administration.) To listen to current Republican rhetoric about Obama’s big-government socialist ways, you would imagine that the reverse was true. It isn’t.

...

A depression was averted. The bail-out of the auto industry was—amazingly—successful. Even the bank bailouts have been repaid to a great extent by a recovering banking sector. The Iraq War—the issue that made Obama the nominee—has been ended on time and, vitally, with no troops left behind. Defense is being cut steadily, even as Obama has moved his own party away from a Pelosi-style reflexive defense of all federal entitlements. Under Obama, support for marriage equality and marijuana legalization has crested to record levels. Under Obama, a crucial state, New York, made marriage equality for gays an irreversible fact of American life. Gays now openly serve in the military, and the Defense of Marriage Act is dying in the courts, undefended by the Obama Justice Department. Vast government money has been poured into noncarbon energy investments, via the stimulus. Fuel-emission standards have been drastically increased. Torture was ended. Two moderately liberal women replaced men on the Supreme Court. Oh, yes, and the liberal holy grail that eluded Johnson and Carter and Clinton, nearly universal health care, has been set into law. Politifact recently noted that of 508 specific promises, a third had been fulfilled and only two have not had some action taken on them. To have done all this while simultaneously battling an economic hurricane makes Obama about as honest a follow-through artist as anyone can expect from a politician. (via)

SOPA and PIPA put the burden on website owners to police user-contributed material and call for the unnecessary blocking of entire sites. Small sites won't have sufficient resources to defend themselves. Big media companies may seek to cut off funding sources for their foreign competitors, even if copyright isn't being infringed. Foreign sites will be blacklisted, which means they won't show up in major search engines. SOPA and PIPA build a framework for future restrictions and suppression.